Intimate Violence

Attacks Upon Psychic Interiority

Joseph Scalia

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231506298
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Traditional analyses of domestic battery often point to the batterer's need for power and control to explain patterns of violent behavior. Offering a nonjudgmental and compassionate view of the interior life of the batterer, Intimate Violence moves beyond this explanation and transforms our understanding of the psychic origins of abuse. The book is divided into three main sections. The first assesses psychoanalytic understanding of the inner mechanisms of the batterer's violent behavior toward close family members, pointing to disruptions in the abuser's "narcissistic equilibrium." The second section looks more broadly at the ideas of "batterer" and "victim," and the ways these categories—and the social stigma and support accorded respectively—may impede healing and resolution. The third section addresses various treatment methods that promise permanent changes in batterers' behavior.

Intimate Violence also deals frankly with the dynamics of the therapist/client relationship in battery cases, particularly transference and countertransference. How do therapists deal with feelings of revulsion for the batterer's behavior, or for the batterer him- or herself? How do they resist the very human urge within themselves to punish their clients? Scalia persuasively argues that these issues subtly undermine counseling, causing resistance to develop within both parties, and that a new approach to therapy is needed. His analysis suggests that "emotional communication" in the context of prolonged and deep psychoanalysis enables patient and practitioner alike to transcend cycles of recrimination and defensiveness.

PART 1

UNDERSTANDING THE BATTERER

CHAPTER ONE

AFFECT REGULATION AND NARCISSISTIC EQUILIBRIUM

Childhood love is boundless, it demands exclusive possession, it is not content with less than all.

—Sigmund Freud (1931)

Rycroft defines affect as a “general term for feelings and emotions” (1968:3). And it is the ego that is responsible for the regulation and management of affect. Freud said of the ego that it “presents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions…. In its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse” (1923:25). This metaphor represents the greater strength of the batterer’s id, specifically his affects during battering, which become uncontainable.

An individual whose affect regulation is impaired only in circumscribed situations, to a lesser rather than greater degree, will present a far different general clinical picture, and specific battering picture, than the person who batters in any number of circumstances and whose tolerance of difficult emotion is severely restricted. The latter will tend toward violence more frequently, with less external provocation and greater physical severity.

Already weaving through these ego-psychological considerations are the self-psychological conceptualizations of narcissistic equilibrium/disequilibrium and narcissistic rage. Ernest Wolf defines narcissistic rage as “a form of potentially violent aggression that aims to destroy an offending selfobject [to be defined below] when this selfobject is experienced as threatening the continued cohesion or existence of the self, particularly when this threat to the self takes the form of imposing helplessness on the self” (1988:000). A selfobject (Kohut 1984) would be that experience, often represented by a significant other (or “object,” when the object is a person), to which the self attaches in a manner that allows it a good-enough estimation of itself and a sufficient sense of self-cohesion.

Matt was seeing me in couples therapy when he suddenly jumped out of his seat, fist reared back, threatening to hit me. He had no real idea of what had just set him off. He even looked rather confused as he stood there, as though he were wondering to himself, “How the hell did I get HERE, standing over this guy like this?” I discuss this incident and its resolution at greater length, so will say only that I had been in dialogue with his wife when suddenly he popped! Something in the way he feels secure had been threatened. I was the cause of this threat and he had to stop it, without deliberation.

Or Puck. Puck became enraged when, in the group home, he was not allowed to keep a padlock on his bedroom door. This locked space seemed to represent to him a nurturing darkness, a space in which he could feel held in safety, cohered. When his vocal intimidation did not win him his way, he began to punch holes in the walls of the house, first outside the staff office, then in his room.¹ The loss of this space, which seemed to serve a selfobject function, was more than he could bear.²

Here, Wolf may be helpful: a selfobject is “the subjective aspect of a self-sustaining function performed by a relationship of self to objects who by their presence or activity evoke and maintain the self and the experience of selfhood” (1988:184). In an earlier work on batterers, I quoted Wolf in a passage that should be disturbingly familiar to those who work with domestic violence. Then, as I do again now, I prefaced his words with “In the author’s experience, batterers are typically [though not always] men with significant characterological disturbance, narcissistically wounded men who experienced harsh [and unintegratable/unprocessable] treatment early in life. Perhaps ironically, their experience with their victims is often one of helplessness and narcissistic vulnerability” (Scalia 1994:549). I follow this passage with Wolf’s “There is hardly a more frightening situation than the threat of helplessness. Individuals respond to this threat with narcissistic rage—a self’s unlimited rage that aims to destroy the origin of the threat to itself. Homicide and suicide are the not uncommon outcomes when there seems to exist no other action to do away with the experience of helplessness” (49). Puck did not go so far as that, but it was easy to see how he could have escalated had we not understood the threat he felt.

While there are other motives for domestic homicides, suicides, and homicide-suicides, this narcissistically defended motive is, I suggest, by far the most common. When batterers are demonized, vilified, or dehumanized, we are a far cry indeed from being able to integrate such a point of view into our overall picture of them. Yet even the batterer’s male-apologist-ascribed motive to control his spouse must often be understood as secondary to a struggle for self-cohesion, primarily motivated by an immediate need to end overwhelming self-pathology suffering, to force the environment into providing comfort and sustenance.

Imagine an obsessive-compulsive man, in disagreement with his wife, who is an hysteric. He is telling her about a struggle he had earlier that day, how he had behaved with a customer who he felt was trying to take advantage of him. In his view of things, he had overcome his usual tendency to be easily pushed around, to acquiesce to demanding others. He is proud of how he asserted himself and was not a milquetoast. Yet, she hears his story as an incident of embarrassment, interprets his behavior as boorish and tells him so. He is wounded, say narcissistically injured. She may be insulting him out of her own sense of having felt degraded or narcissistically injured, by imagining a social encounter with her husband’s customer. In response to her insult, imagine that he feels impelled to extract an apology from her. Unless he derives support from her, he is unable to sustain a good self-estimation. She responds to his entreaty—or demand—with further indignation and degradation of him. Matters escalate.

Battering may be seen as a defense against the threat of narcissistic disequilibrium. It also goes hand in hand with the ego-defense of “identification with the aggressor,” which will be explored in chapter 3. Battering occurs when the subject finds no alternative to restoring a sufficient sense of narcissistic equilibrium, sufficient freedom from perceived environmental impingements, to the extent that the subject may maintain a sense of going-on-being (Winnicott 1965), a sense that he will survive. Battering is also a defense against what Winnicott (1962) called unthinkable anxiety—or the psychotic anxiety of “going to pieces”; indeed, some batterers experience “flying apart/exploding apart (from within),” only a slight modification of Winnicott’s term. Thus, if we think of battering as a defense against affect deregulation, or narcissistic disequilibrium, we need to understand the implicit, intrapsychic, intervening variable(s) between them. Identification with the aggressor will be shown to be one of these variables, and in fact a necessary one.

SOURCES OF AFFECT DISREGULATION/NARCISSISTIC DISEQUILIBRIUM AND THE PATHOGNOMONIC BATTERER DEFENSES AGAINST THEM

How is it that our obsessive patient mentioned above is not able to manage being insulted without experiencing a crisis of self-cohesion? These impaired ego functions in the batterer are a product of developmental goings astray whose origins or foundational roots predate the oedipal period of development. Without going into any explication of the oedipal period, it might simply be said that the batterer lacks an adequate observing ego. It is during preoedipal development that the groundwork for the establishment of the observing ego occurs. The separation-individuation stage of development is particularly pertinent here and will be returned to in chapter 2. But for now, around issues pursuant to battering, around issues pursuant to affect regulation and narcissistic equilibrium, the batterer is more or less unable to observe (before, during, or after battering) his own responsibility for his violence.

There is a noteworthy exception to the statement I have made, one that has to do with the type of patient that Kohut (1972) called a pseudonarcissistic psychoneurotic; this is a point of significant clinical and social relevance and will be taken up separately. But the batterer we are most familiar with, the type that we villainize, is disturbed in his capacity to fully contemplate that it is he who “did the deed.” He certainly knows that he physically strikes out, but he does not locate the responsibility for his misbehavior squarely within himself. Even among batterers who appear to understand the actual chain of events, careful idiographic clinical study must be made, as they may not have this knowledge deeply integrated. Or, if they do, they will be unable to maintain it in certain stressful situations (this would be our pseudonarcissist) and will resort to the following character-defensive posture so as to justify their renewed use of battering when they become once more unable to regulate their own affect or maintain their own narcissistic equilibrium.

It is of the utmost importance to emphasize that when an individual batters to regulate his overwhelming affect, he is not intending to victimize anyone, at least not consciously and at least not as a primary action. The motive to batter is always secondary to the primary motive of protecting the inner self. The individual victim is not the actual other but an internal “object” threatening the self. That this internal object is externalized in order for battering to occur is merely a function of the subject’s inability in the moment to recognize any projective occurrence taking place within him.

At that point, obviously, there is a failed empathic function, which will also be separately taken up in chapter 2. But, for now, something must be said about “character defenses” (Fenichel 1945), for it is character defenses that give the batterer his stated rationales, justifications, rationalizations for why he batters.

In discussing reactive character traits, Fenichel explained how habitual defensive attitudes are used to protect the subject against threatening stimulation, be it external or internal, instinctual or emotional. These are character defenses. Blaming others is a universal character defense of batterers.

In the current political-psychological climate with regard to domestic violence, it needs to be stated that this defense operates whether or not the subject is correct in his assessment that his other has mistreated him in some fashion.³ Even when the other has been defensively or egocentrically wounding toward the subject, that subject still relies upon blame of the object for his own failure to manage his internal responses, for his failure to contain what is occurring within him. Helping the batterer sort out objective disappointments or grievances—that is, helping him sort out when his spouse has behaved hurtfully toward him—from those events in which he has erroneous expectations and perceptions of her should hardly be understood as “colluding with the batterer.” Yet it is misconstrued in just this way by many individuals and by many guiding principles within the domestic violence field. The fear of acknowledging legitimate batterer grievances against his spouse is that he will feel more justified in blaming her for his behavior, more justified in the battering itself or in its precursors and sequelae. In point of fact, however, with each improvement of the subject’s observing ego, which such differentiation affords, comes concomitant ego strengthenings of various types, all of which ameliorate his need for the defense of battering and for character defenses in general.

One of these ego functions, aimed at regulating affect, is emotional insulation. Freud (1920:27) spoke of a “protective shield,” presaging Spotnitz’s (1987 [1976]) development of the concepts of stimulus barrier and emotional insulation. Spotnitz describes intrauterine life as the beginning of the development of a stimulus barrier and the mother’s body as the prototype of this barrier, as it “provides a shock-free atmosphere … from the excessive impact of the surrounding organs—the impinging environment” (122). After birth, the mother, usually the primary caregiver,

continues to perform her insulative role; but she shifts from the involuntary biological operations of the gestation period to voluntary activity that will facilitate (the infant’s) adjustment and growth in a more rigorous environment. By meeting the infant’s maturational needs through the proper balance of gratification and frustration, she helps to prepare his body and mind to take over the task of insulating himself.

Spotnitz discusses the normal development of the stimulus barrier and emotional insulation, pointing out that during the first few years of life nervous tissue is being sheathed in myelin, its own insulating substance.⁴ It may be that deficits in emotional stimulation will have to be activated in the transference-countertransference matrix (Marshall and Marshall 1988), with outcomes quite different from the psychopathogenic or neuropathogenic ones. If this happens time after time, might neurological change occur alongside the psychostructural? This is a different matter, and will be dealt with in part 3.

After a review of Freud’s (1950; released in 1950, though actually written a half-century earlier) “Project for a Scientific Psychology” and the studies of Wilder Penfeld and his associates at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Spotnitz (1987) maintains:

The findings just reviewed shed some light on what transpires in a patient’s nervous system during the psychotherapeutic process. They also suggest that, when we ask him to cooperate in the two-fold task of developing healthful forms of insulation and the appropriate verbal discharge patterns he needs, we are actually making enormous demands on the patient. These demands involve the reorganization and reintegration of his nervous system.

Any kind of talking won’t do this job. The exceedingly intricate neurophysiological mechanisms involved in talking are utilized to secure the release into language of certain feelings that were associated with highly charged emotional experiences. The patient must verbalize the destructive impulses that he has been holding in check through pathological forms of insulation. If he does not possess sufficient patterns for verbal discharge, he has to be assisted in developing additional patterns. (128)

We may actually be asking batterers to undergo a process such that neurophysiological change must occur concomitantly with psychostructural alteration. Or, if real psychostructural change is going to occur in the batterer, does neurophysiological change inevitably occur with it? Must there be reroutings in the brain, requiring great effort, in order for real psychostructural change to occur in the batterer?

Similarly, Bollas (1987) speaks of language in psychoanalysis as having a transformational function; but implicit in this concept is the notion that we are dealing with deeply rooted and hitherto unthought but known, and deeply influential, defining, and orienting subjective experiences. Inherent in both theoreticians’ concepts is the idea that the primary and deepest motivational factors must become activated and elucidated in the treatment. Overlaying these phenomena with interventions that do not reach them, that do not attempt to articulate and transform them, is doomed to fail.

So often treatment for batterers consists of inculcating them in the interpersonal politics of the power and control wheel, or some other consciousness-raising schema. Other treatments try to provide batterers with techniques for calming down when their anger begins to mount. These are ideas that are easily conveyed in short periods of time but that do not reach very far inside the batterer’s experience. They are topical and universally applied. They have no chance of dealing with something as big as psychic structures that appear to have organic substrates or actual organic concomitants.

An example may help to carry my point. A twelve-year-old boy has been having temper tantrums all his life. He has felt deeply violated over and over, beginning when his parents could not calm him as an infant and they grew very frustrated, felt persecuted by him, and acted to stop what were to them impingements on their going-on-being. His mother would grow cold and remote; his father would become rough with him, convey a bit of a threat. This began in infancy when he cried past the parents’ comfort zones. As he got a little older, the nature of the threats changed, but the frustration was a familiar one. He felt a deep injustice that became almost his closest companion (Bollas’s conservative object [1987]). In the mind or the brain of the batterer, one can metaphorically imagine deep channels carrying affective and interpersonal experience, channels worn ever deeper over time, with higher canyon walls ever building. These channels carry the passion and pathos of ill-treatment and the helpless fight against it. When the forces that built this channel system change, the courses will not change easily with them. They are channelized, and the water doesn’t flow easily out of them.

The batterer’s defensive employments reveal a very rigid ego attitude, one of blaming the spouse or children for any of the batterer’s violence. When the patient “can’t stand the heat in the kitchen,” when the interpersonal environment overstimulates or overwhelms him, and when he strikes out in abusive ways, he does not then believe that he is misbehaving. At that moment there is no observing ego in operation to decide, selfishly, that he would rather be abusive than struggle with his inner experiences. Instead he experiences himself, subjectively, in an emergency situation; he automatically and nonself-reflectively strikes out, fo...